The poor slave, on his hard, pine plank, but scantily covered with his thin blanket, sleeps more soundly than the feverish voluptuary who reclines upon his feather bed and downy pillow.
In his autobiography, Douglass contrasts the peaceful sleep of an enslaved person with the troubled rest of a wealthy, self-indulgent individual.
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Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.
The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.
The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.